The Great Mac Switch and the Great Desktop Makeover
May 4, 2008 by Kit
The title may have suggested to you that I’m one of those Mac evangelists. Well, I was, just because I was impressed by its visuals and physical design. I haven’t actually used a Mac extensively (I couldn’t afford it yet), and that’s the reason why I now consider myself a former Mac evangelist. I couldn’t preach what I didn’t practice ;P
Performance-wise, intuitiveness-wise, and visuals-wise, I’m pretty convinced that the Mac does better than Windows.
This is a rather new machine I’m using. When I bought it last year, the sales staff “required” that it should run Vista, just because XP drivers weren’t available. What the. Is this another martial law mandate by Bill Gates? Well, I had to spend three days looking for drivers in order to get it to run XP. I will never get Vista. When I start earning enough soon, it’s switching time.
I’ve had my fair share of Windows blues and (pun intended) blue screens of death.
I got tired of Windows’ bulgy and obese GUI (from a previous post):
I had long been a “non-fan” of Windows XP’s user interface. With all that unnecessary eye candy and emboss effects, it seems to take up too much screen real estate.
Now, since the Mac’s visuals were the first to catch my eye, and I couldn’t afford one, I embarked on a journey to extinguish 99.99% of Windows GUI presence from my desktop.
On my adventures, I met FlyakiteOSX, RocketDock, LiteStep, Styler, uxtheme.dll, Prism, Ashen VS, Bandit VS, etc. At deviantart, customize, aqua-soft, osx-e, etc., I met people who had the same plight as me (got tired of the Windows GUI). I could provide links but I think you should have your own adventures, too :) Now you know what to search for on Google 
This is the kind of workspace I have at home. Click to see the full-res version.
Probably, when I actually do switch, I would still be using Windows, tricked out like this of course
This entry is a response to a Business Week blog post (via John Arens) and an interesting Mac-related page.
is the mac really that good? i’ve never used on but i think it’s for sissies and lazy people who don’t want to use their brains. haha.
for a time, i used RKLauncher for my icons so it’d look mac-ish. Didn’t like it. I like lots of desktop icons on my computer for fast launching.
I’ll probably try it again. I’m in this phase where I’m trying to clean up my desktop if possible. hehehe.
i suggest you go theme hunting in deviantart. there are lots of stuff there…
wait a minute.. you mentioned that already. hehe.
if you knew how, we could make our own you know. I tried customizing my icons once with photoshop but got bored eventually. haha.
@uzi
Not use their brains? Haha! You got a point there. But there are people who just regard computers like ATMs. “Hey, ATM, give me money!” Then it obediently spits the money out like a good dog. They just want to use their brain resources for other things.
The mac does have its own tools for developers and administrators, but it’s not their main selling point. Well, as I’ve said, I was mostly impressed by its visuals and maybe also performance-wise.
But now that I am getting cozy with desktop customizing, well there’s this blog entry
hehe… And I am happy with my clean desktop. IMHO a cluttered desktop is slower because you have to look for your icons 
That screenshot actually contains some unmodified and heavily modified skinning elements I found all over the skinning web communities. I even feel guilty for not giving proper credit to the original authors. When I can get down to it, I’ll be posting links and maybe a zip file for the entire theming and skinning package I’m using right now. That’s a promise
P.S. I think RocketDock is faster and better than RKLauncher.